Greger - How Not to Diet

Surely, if there were a safe, simple, side effectfree solution to obesity, we would know about it by now, right?

Im not so sure.

It takes an estimated average of seventeen years before evidence from scientific research is incorporated into day-to-day clinical practice. Even now, hundreds of thousands of Americans continue to perish every year from what we learned nearly thirty years ago is an arrestable, reversible condition. In fact, I had seen such a reversal with my own eyes.

My dear grandmother was cured of her end-stage heart disease by one of Ornishs contemporaries, Nathan Pritikin, using similar methods. She was sixty-five when she was given her medical death sentence, butthanks to a healthy dietwas able to live another thirty-one years to age ninety-six, to continue enjoying her six grandkids, including me.

If effectively the cure to the number-one killer of men and women could be ignored and get lost down some rabbit hole, what else might be buried in the medical literature? Ive made it my lifes mission to find out. Thats why I went to medical school in the first place and why I started NutritionFacts.org.

So, like heart disease, might there already be a cure for obesity? Thats what I intended to uncover.

Heres the problem: I hate diet books. Furthermore, I hate diet books that purport to hate diet books yet relish in all the same absurdities. This book is for those who want facts, not filler, fantasy, or fluff. If you want testimonials and before-and-after pictures, youve come to the wrong place. You dont need anecdotes when you have evidence. A Harvard sociologist of science calls those arguments by anecdotes in diet books a deliberate attempt at credibility engineering. When you dont have the science to back you up, all you have are success stories.

Im not interested in offering dueling anecdotes, nor am I interested in dietary dogma, beliefs, or opinions. What I am interested in is the science. When it comes to making life-and-death decisions that concern something as important as your own health and that of your family, as far as Im concerned, theres only one question: What does the best available balance of evidence say right now? Thats what Ive tried to encapsulate in this book.

Often, diet books deal in pseudoscientific twaddle swaddled in the trappings of science. But how is the untrained reader supposed to know the difference between the two and decide among the competing claims? Its no wonder people tend to flock to their respective gurus to have their minds made up for them. However, no one is born with this knowledgeand you have a right to demand to know where diet book authors got the information theyre trying to sell you so you can check the credibility of the source and confirm its veracity. Thats why I prefer presenting the science in video format on my website, where I can show the original data and link to downloads of all the primary sources. And here in this book, Ive tried to cite each substantive statement of fact.

My goal was to create the oxymoron: an evidence-based diet book.

No other area of the national health probably is as abused by deception and misinformation as nutrition. Many travesties cheat the public of enormous sums of money, and of good health as well.

WHITE HOUSE CONFERENCE ON FOOD, NUTRITION, AND HEALTH

Frustrated by the current political climate of alternative facts and echo chambers? Welcome to my world. The entire diet industry is built upon a foundation of fake news. The nutrition field has been dealing with bald-faced lies since back in the pre-post-truth era, and diet books can be the worst offenders. Often the loudest, most extreme voices drown out the well informed, wrote two noted nutrition professors on the subject of diet books. There is also money to be made.

Lots of money. Every month seems to bring us a trendy new diet or weight-loss fad, and they always sell because they always fail. The diet industry may rake in up to $50 billion a year, and the business model is based on repeat customers. Racked with the guilt and self-hatred of failure, people often line right back up to be fooled again. I hope this book can help break that cycle by cutting through the BS.

Beyond the corrupting influence of commercial interests are the ideological biases. Too often in diet books, the rule is to obfuscate rather than illuminate, cherry-pick facts to push some pet theory, and ignore the rest to promote your own agenda. Its the opposite of science. In true scholarship, your conclusions follow from the evidence, not the other way around.

Unfortunately, even just sticking to the peer-reviewed scientific literature is not enough. An article in The New England Journal of Medicine on obesity myths concluded that false and scientifically unsupported beliefs about obesity are pervasive in medical journals as well. In that case, the only way to get at the truth is to dive deep into the primary literature and read all the original studies yourself rather than taking some contemporary reviewers word for it. But whos got time for that? There are more than half a million scientific papers on the subject of obesity, with a hundred new ones published every day. Even researchers in the field might only be able to keep track of whats going on in their narrow, subspecialized domains. But thats precisely what we do at NutritionFacts.org. We comb through tens of thousands of studies a year so you dont have to.

This is the kind of book I was made for. My research team and I were allowed to really flex our muscles, and the sorer those muscles got, the further we stretched ourselves, the more valuable we realized this contribution would be. Even simple questions on weight loss, like whether you should eat breakfast or skip it, or whether its better to exercise before or after meals, turned into major, thousand-article research projects. If our nose-to-the-grindstone research team had trouble sifting through the stacks, a practicing physician would have no chance and the public would be totally lost.

Whether youre morbidly obese, just overweight like the average American, or at your ideal weight and wanting to keep it that way, our goal was to give you every possible tweak and technique we could find to build the optimal weight-control solution from the ground up.

I went into this project with the goal of creating a distillation of all the best science, but to my delight, I discovered all sorts of exciting new tools and tricks along the way. We did indeed uncover a treasure trove of buried data, like simple spices proven in randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled studies to accelerate weight loss for pennies a day. With so little profit potential, its no wonder those studies never saw the light of day.

And we were even able to traverse beyond the existing evidence base to propose a novel method to eliminate body fat. The proposed technique appears to have a strong theoretical basis but has never been put to the test because apparently no one has ever thought of it before. It cant be monetized either, but the only profiting I care about is your health. Thats why I donate to charity 100 percent of the proceeds I get from my DVDs, speaking engagements, and books, including the one youre holding right now. I just want to do for everyones family what Pritikin did for mine.